Textual Media

The Color of Television was an interesting hypertext for a few reasons.  First off, I found the actual writing itself to be pretty good.  At times, it reminded me a lot of Calvino, especially in the way that pages would end right at the climax, forcing you to click around to try and find the continuation.  It was also interesting that there were a few different stories going on at once, all on the same page, simply differentiated by color and text.  This allows the reader to either pick which story they want to try and follow, or to read each story but to know when they’re reading a different story.

My immediate thought when I opened The Color of Television was "wow, the design of this page isn’t very good".  As I read through the pages, I remembered that the page was designed in 1996, almost ten years ago.  When I continued to read, I realized that different colored text identified different stories, and that didn’t make the design so bad.  As a hypertext the design works, you can identify individual stories; you can find the links that take you to different lexia, etc.  I thought it would be interesting to see that site redesigned by today’s web design standards, and to see if it would have the same effect and impact as this original version.

Pax was slightly confusing.  I read the "about" page, so I had a slight idea of what I would see when I began to click through the page.  As I began to work my way through the page, I honestly got a little bit bored.  The amount of clicking necessary for the small amount of text received wasn’t giving me enough quite the satisfaction I was seeking.  Similar to The Color of Television though, it was easy to recognize when a different character was speaking, mainly because their face would pop up in the bottom right of the left segment of the screen as the new text popped up on the right side of the screen.  As I continued to click through Pax, I started trying to pay more attention to the words appearing and changing in the background.  It was hard to read the words in the background and keep track of the text appearing on the right side of the screen, but I was wondering if those two separate pieces of text had any relation.  That is to say, if what appeared in the background related to what was showing up on the right side of the screen.  I feel like I would need to spend a whole lot more time with Pax to figure out if the two pieces of text had any relation. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 9:19 AM and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.